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Y Combinator founder Paul Graham said the startup accelerator has not fired Sam Altman.
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Altman held positions at OpenAI and Y Combinator before leaving the latter in 2019.
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“We didn’t want him to leave just to choose one or the other,” Graham said.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was not fired as president of Y Combinator in 2019, the startup accelerator’s co-founder Paul Graham said Thursday.
“People are claiming that YC fired Sam Altman. That’s not true,” Graham wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Altman’s departure, Graham said, was because they needed someone to run Y Combinator full-time.
“For a number of years he ran both YC and OpenAI, but when OpenAI announced that it would become a for-profit subsidiary and that Sam would become the CEO, we (Jessica in particular) told him that if he would go to work on OpenAI full-time , we need to find someone else to lead YC, and he agreed,” Graham said, referring to his co-founder and wife Jessica Livingston.
Altman stepped down as president of Y Combinator on March 8, 2019, just three days before OpenAI announced it would lose its status as a quintessential nonprofit.
The ChatGPT creator said in a blog post on March 11, 2019 that it was a “capped profit” for-profit company governed by a nonprofit.
“If he had said he would find someone else as CEO of OpenAI so he could focus 100% on YC, we would have been fine with that too,” Graham added. “We didn’t want him to leave just to choose one or the other.”
Graham’s comments contradicted earlier reports from newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post last year. Both outlets reported that Altman was asked to leave the organization because he favored his personal interests over those of Y Combinator.
Representatives for Altman and Y Combinator did not immediately respond to requests for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.
The news surrounding Altman’s time at Y Combinator comes amid increased interest in his leadership at OpenAI. Altman was briefly fired as CEO in November after OpenAI’s board said he was “not consistently candid in his communications” with it.
Former OpenAI board member Helen Toner said in an interview on “The TED AI Show” this week that Altman was a deceptive figure who had lied to the board “multiple” times.
“For years, Sam made it very difficult for the board to actually do that work by withholding information, misrepresenting things happening at the company and in some cases outright lying to the board,” Toner said.
Toner had made similar accusations in an op-ed she co-authored with another former board member, Tasha McCauley. The piece, which The Economist published on Sunday, said OpenAI could not be trusted to run itself with Altman at the helm.
On Thursday, current OpenAI board members Bret Taylor and Larry Summers wrote a rebuttal to Toner and McCauley, which was also published in The Economist.
“We do not accept Ms. Toner and Ms. McCauley’s claims about the events at OpenAI,” Taylor and Summers wrote.
“That said, we share Ms. Toner and Ms. McCauley’s view – and the company and Mr. Altman have consistently stated – that the evolution of AI represents a significant development in human history,” the pair added. “In democratic societies, accountability to government and government regulation are essential.”
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